Dark Hypotenuse

She who is close to this writing hand, for better or verse, subtextual and contratpuntal, the dark hypotenuse to my every angling dangling here ... Any paean Hekate must iterate in her triune realms of the earthly life -- down from Olympus, south of Heaven, necessary and forceful like Ananke and Bia (those other Titanesses in the employ of Zeus) yet also outerboundaried, overabundant, hypovenusian, of the widest and wildest extrapolation words can find, can never. I'm talking here of the Queen of Sin, the divine fall without which there can be no elect, no postlapsarian 'burb, nothing said, no eternal soul to lose.

Kerenyi, in The Gods of the Greeks:

Hekate had a share of sky, earth and sea, but never became an Olympian goddess. She was closely connected with the life of our women, therefore with mankind generally, that she seemed smaller than the wives and daughters of Zeus. On the other hand, her realm -- especially the sea, where in primordial times she carried on her love affairs -- was so great that the Olympian could not possibly control it. When she was not walking on the highways, she dwelt in her cave. So did her daughter Skylla, a sea-bogy -- according, at least, to the tales of our seamen, whose main object in telling them was to frighten landsmen. For they themselves knew the real nature of even the most dangerous parts of the sea, and did not associate the great goddess who could appear in many shapes, with a single spot only.

If I am A and Thou art B, She is the transit opposite our infinitely-waylaid bedding, following the alternate course of that starry union, the shadow self of it, its abysmal shelf, its unconscious reading, the black sutra which praises the agony of our union, its difficulty, its long travail and travels, she completes herself in the vast black empyrean of every way I failed to reach You...






SIN

Sept. 30

For years the Philly soul
tune “Me and Mrs. Jones”
has washed sweet and
heavy in my ear,
held there there by
teenaged memory’s
pure gilt nails.
One late afternoon
in 1973 I walked home
in the cold hell of
Chicago’s near-north side,
my heart despairing
of a girl who
who always fell hard
for my friends
& cried to me
when they always
left her. I knew I
was not her type,
a gawky blonde,
too Appalachian
where she
preferred the
darkhaired Puerto
Rican with his
switchblade smile
and snappy steps
on the dancefloor.
Whenever I hear
“Me and Mrs. Jones”
I think of me imagining
her dancing with all
of them as I walked
the last streets home
in the dying gold light
of winter. I was deep
into the city yet
it seemed I was
alone, the row
houses all mute
and shut, busses
lumbering past
with iced-up windows,
no one else fool enough
to walk out in
the bitter
cold (though I loved
it that I walked
alone, my self-pity
at the time of
that song arch,
even archetypal) --:
“Me and Mrs. Jones
played in my head in
an almost hymnal way,
bittersweet and lyrical,
the impossible love
song impossibly and
defiantly true.
Yet it occurred to me
yesterday as I
spun the song on
CD driving home
in late September
light (wanheat,
gold roads clotted
with pickup trucks
and SUV’s roaring back
to the consequence of love)
that the words were
important too, scriptural
in reverse, blessing
an adulterous affair
with a ghetto-wattage
of defiance. The singer
knows it’s wrong that
he and Mrs. Jones meet
each day at six thirty
at their favorite cafe,
holding hands, making
up plans, playing
their favorite song
over and over and
over again: Knows
it must come to
an end some day too
soon; that each of them
will trudge back to
their own separate
lives of unmentioned
husbands an wives,
living out the rest
of their lives
in the blues-festered
wounds they have created:
But right then, in the hallows
of the song, the only
thing that matters is
that they are together
for three minutes
of a song, more together
maybe than they’ll ever be
again. That’s the magic
of their sin, in choosing
to go left when all
the world & heaven too
commands them not
to give in, to do
the right thing instead.
Choosing to sin
is to love the
profane with hearts
made sacred by a will
as powerful as the devil’s
if only for a song
played over and over
and over for one season.
As my own fallen
heart’s anthem,
“Me and Mrs. Jones”
dives deep into the
magnitude of sin,
sketching a vault
of impregnate holiness
rimmed by cold
emptiness, a savagely
sweet error
it is death to veer
back to God from
once we’ve chosen
to dance and fall.
I was sixteen and losing
my faith in God,
that iron omnipresence
which ruled from
the other side of
grey skies, His love and
promise too far away
to help me much
while the object
of my starving love
kept turning away,
a repeating whirl
which sliced
me clean into two
stumps of heart
each time,
one bloody, the
other black. Nor could
He help me with the icy
evidence of my
parents’ failure to
stay married, my
mother walking round her
day like a revenant,
my father keeping
long & longer hours
at the church, confiding
with me late at night
as we hit the Scotch
that he was gay
& moving East
after my mother
took my siblings South.
God couldn’t, or
wouldn’t, help me with
my salt appeals:
So what did I owe
Him? That question
I think hovered in
my mind as the song
played in my ear,
walking home that steely day.
The refusal of my
faith I think began
inside the hallows of
that song, warming
into a bittersweet
interior which changed
the frozen doors of row
houses that I passed
into options, their
portals boozing wide
to beds inside,
warmed by knee-
spread iniquity, the
billows of the damned.
“Me and Mrs. Jones”
became the moonlit
monologue of my
backslide to hell,
a sweet descending
poem which droned
the infernal truth
in love for earthly things,
greaving my ways
and words for she
who ruled the byways
of the found, by
sea, by rooks of night,
in uxurious nooks
between a woman’s
sighs. The opening
sin welcomed in me
I knew was wrong,
far short of heaven’s
work (hamartia,
the Greek root of
our word for sin,
means “missing the mark”),
but holy enough: All
I felt a boy-man could
be about, given the
damage in my cold
winter’s heart. There
is a note of confession
in “Me and Mrs. Jones,”
like a story being
rehearsed for some later
return: A wine
mixed with with
blessing, too, the
boozy glow which
warms the gut
when we settle for
settling for, and take
our comfort there,
God as some white man’s
supreme demands
be damned. A Friday
night song; or, better
so, one for Friday
afternoons when we’re
walking home
toward bitter ends
and game for one good
fall. When we’re
whispering the prayer
of every falling angel
just off the icy precipice:
Fuck It. Say it once
and the song redeems.
Say it thrice and you’ll
hear on every jukebox
at closing time.
Thus ensued the years
of whiskey’s faux gold,
false-godly roads, my
faulted self become
a vault of fevers
wrongs & terrors, my
brain & liver pickling
in a well of flame-
tickling sin.
Horrible yes, though
ruled by the angelic
demon of that song. I was
just looking for love,
you know, in all the
wounded ways a feral
heart completes itself
through all the graves
it grieves. I found my
God that way, in all
the realms below,
His awe and awfulness
the truer part of me
which aches for
all roads home
& swills not girls
but gods of them
til You and I are one.
Stroll with me,
blue violin, toll the
bells of Philly soul
my way, broken and
bedamned and holy
if only for this song
this once, this single
gold kiss, just before
the sun sets for good.
Be my last and
only portal to
love’s dark,
unquiescent
and slow-dancing rue.